Transcript American Poetry, 1945-1990: The Anti-Tradition

Traditional forms and ideas no longer seemed to provide meaning to many
American poets in the second half of the 20th century. Events after World
War II produced for many writers a sense of history as discontinuous: Each
act, emotion, and moment was seen as unique. Style and form now seemed
provisional, makeshift, reflexive of the process of composition and the
writer's self-awareness. Familiar categories of expression were suspect;
originality was becoming a new tradition.
The break from tradition gathered momentum during the 1957 obscenity
trial of Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl. When the San Francisco customs office
seized the book, its publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights, brought a
lawsuit. During that notorious court case, famous critics defended Howl's
passionate social criticism on the basis of the poem's redeeming literary
merit. Howl's triumph over the censors helped propel the rebellious Beat
poets – especially Ginsberg and his friends Jack Kerouac and William
Burroughs – to fame.
It is not hard to find historical causes for this dissociated sensibility in the United
States. World War II itself, the rise of anonymity and consumerism in a mass
urban society, the protest movements of the 1960s, the decade-long Vietnam
conflict, the Cold War, environmental threats – the catalog of shocks to American
culture is long and varied. The change that most transformed American society,
however, was the rise of the mass media and mass culture. First radio, then
movies, and later an all-powerful, ubiquitous television presence changed
American life at its roots. From a private, literate, elite culture based on the book
and reading, the United States became a media culture attuned to the voice on
the radio, the music of compact discs and cassettes, film, and the images on the
television screen.
American poetry was directly influenced by the mass media and electronic
technology. Films, videotapes, and tape recordings of poetry readings and
interviews with poets became available, and new inexpensive photographic
methods of printing encouraged young poets to self-publish and young editors
to begin literary magazines – of which there were more than 2,000 by 1990.
At the same time, Americans became uncomfortably aware that technology, so
useful as a tool, could be used to manipulate the culture. To Americans seeking
alternatives, poetry seemed more relevant than before: It offered people a way
to express subjective life and articulate the impact of technology and mass
society on the individual.
A host of styles, some regional, some associated with famous schools or poets,
vied for attention; post-World War II American poetry was decentralized, richly
varied, and difficult to summarize. For the sake of discussion, however, it can be
arranged along a spectrum, producing three overlapping camps – the traditional
on one end, the idiosyncratic in the middle, and the experimental on the other
end.
Traditional poets have maintained or revitalized poetic traditions. Idiosyncratic
poets have used both traditional and innovative techniques in creating unique
voices. Experimental poets have courted new cultural styles.
Traditionalism
Traditional writers include acknowledged masters of established
forms and diction who wrote with a readily recognizable craft,
often using rhyme or a set metrical pattern. Often they were
from the U.S. eastern seaboard or the southern part of the
country, and taught in colleges and universities.
-Richard Eberhart
and Richard Wilbur;
-The older Fugitive poets John Crowe Ransom,
-Allen Tate,
and Robert Penn Warren;
-Such accomplished younger poets as John Hollander
-Richard Howard
; and the early Robert Lowell
-In the years after World War II, they
became established and were frequently
anthologized.
Traditionalist poets :
They were generally precise, realistic, and
witty; many, like Richard Wilbur (1921- ),
were influenced by British metaphysical
poets brought to favor by T.S. Eliot.
Traditionalism
Traditional poets, unlike many experimentalists
who distrusted "too poetic" diction, welcomed
resounding poetic lines.
Traditional poets also at times used a somewhat
rhetorical diction of obsolete or odd words, using
many adjectives and inversions, in which the
natural, spoken word order of English is altered
unnaturally. Sometimes the effect is noble, as in the
line by Warren; other times, the poetry seems
stilted and out of touch with real emotions.
-Occasionally, as in Hollander, Howard,
and James Merrill (1926-1995), selfconscious diction combines with wit,
puns, and literary allusions.
Merrill, who was innovative in his urban
themes, unrhymed lines, personal
subjects, and light conversational tone,
shares a witty habit with the
traditionalists.
Traditionalism
-Obvious fluency and verbal pyrotechnics by some poets,
including Merrill and John Ashbery, made them successful in
traditional terms, although they redefined poetry in radically
innovative ways.
-Stylistic gracefulness made some poets seem more traditional
than they were.
-Although many traditional poets used rhyme, not all rhymed
poetry was traditional in subject or tone.
-Many poets, including Brooks, Adrienne Rich, Richard Wilbur,
Robert Lowell, and Robert Penn Warren, began writing
traditionally, using rhyme and meters, but abandoned these in
the 1960s under the pressure of public events and a gradual
trend toward open forms.
-The most influential poet of the period was Robert Lowell
Idiosyncratic Poets
Poets who developed unique styles drawing
on tradition but extending it into new
realms with a distinctively contemporary
flavor.
The most influential poets of the period, in
addition to Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton,
include John Berryman, Theodore Roethke,
Richard Hugo, Philip Levine, James Dickey,
Elizabeth Bishop, and Adrienne Rich.
Experimental Poetry
The force behind Robert Lowell's mature achievement and much of contemporary
poetry lies in the experimentation begun in the 1950s by a number of poets. They
may be divided into five loose schools, identified by Donald Allen in The New
American Poetry, 1945-1960 (1960), the first anthology to present the work of
poets who were previously neglected by the critical and academic communities.
Inspired by jazz and abstract expressionist painting, most of the experimental
writers are a generation younger than Lowell. They have tended to be bohemian,
counterculture intellectuals who disassociated themselves from universities and
outspokenly criticized "bourgeois" American society.
Their poetry is daring, original, and sometimes shocking. In its search for new
values, it claims affinity with the archaic world of myth, legend, and traditional
societies such as those of the American Indian.
The forms are looser, more spontaneous, organic; they arise from the subject
matter and the feeling of the poet as the poem is written, and from the natural
pauses of the spoken language. As Allen Ginsberg noted in "Improvised Poetics,"
"first thought best thought."
The Black Mountain School
The Black Mountain School centered around Black Mountain
College, an experimental liberal arts college in Asheville,
North Carolina, where poets Charles Olson, Robert Duncan,
and Robert Creeley taught in the early 1950s.
The Black Mountain School is linked with Charles Olson's
theory of "projective verse," which insisted on an open form
based on the spontaneity of the breath pause in speech and
the typewriter line in writing.
Robert Creeley (1926-2005), who writes with a terse,
minimalist style, was one of the major Black Mountain poets.
The San Francisco School
The work of the San Francisco School owes much to Eastern philosophy and religion, as
well as to Japanese and Chinese poetry. This is not surprising because the influence of
the Orient has always been strong in the U.S. West.
The land around San Francisco – the Sierra Nevada Mountains and the jagged seacoast
– is lovely and majestic, and poets from that area tend to have a deep feeling for nature.
Many of their poems are set in the mountains or take place on backpacking trips. The
poetry looks to nature instead of literary tradition as a source of inspiration.
San Francisco poets include Jack Spicer, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Duncan, Gary
Snyder. Many of these poets identify with working people. Their poetry is often simple,
accessible, and optimistic.
At its best, as seen in the work of Gary Snyder (1930- ), San Francisco poetry evokes the
delicate balance of the individual and the cosmos.
Beat Poets
The San Franciso School blends into the next grouping – the Beat poets, who emerged in the
1950s. The term beat variously suggests musical downbeats, as in jazz; angelical beatitude
or blessedness; and "beat up" – tired or hurt.
The Beats (beatniks) were inspired by jazz, Eastern religion, and the wandering life.
Most of the important Beats migrated to San Francisco from America's East Coast, gaining
their initial national recognition in California. The charismatic Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)
became the group's chief spokesperson.
Beat poetry is oral, repetitive, and immensely effective in readings, largely because it
developed out of poetry readings in underground clubs. Some might correctly see it as a
great-grandparent of the rap music that became prevalent in the 1990s.
Beat poetry was the most anti-establishment form of literature in the United States, but
beneath its shocking words lies a love of country. The poetry is a cry of pain and rage at
what the poets see as the loss of America's innocence and the tragic waste of its human and
material resources.
The New York School
Unlike the Beat and San Francisco poets, the poets of the New York School were not
interested in overtly moral questions, and, in general, they steered clear of political issues.
They had the best formal educations of any group.
The major figures of the New York School – John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and Kenneth Koch –
met while they were undergraduates at Harvard University. They are quintessentially urban,
cool, nonreligious, witty with a poignant, pastel sophistication. Their poems are fast moving,
full of urban detail, incongruity, and an almost palpable sense of suspended belief.
New York City is the fine arts center of America and the birthplace of abstract expressionism,
a major inspiration of this poetry. Most of the poets worked as art reviewers or museum
curators, or collaborated with painters. Perhaps because of their feeling for abstract art,
which distrusts figurative shapes and obvious meanings, their work is often difficult to
comprehend, as in the later work of John Ashbery (1927- ), perhaps the most critically
esteemed poet of the late 20th century.